Only One Female Mold
In most animated works and comics featuring an ensemble cast, particularly a Five-Man Band, the male characters will have a wide range of body types -- The Smart Guy will often be small and slender, The Big Guy will be either huge and muscular or endearingly pudgy, and The Hero will typically be somewhere in between.
Female characters, however, tend to have almost identical body shapes—typically standing one head shorter than the hero, relatively slender build, very little muscle definition. Breast size varies depending on the work, but in many cases, all the women in the cast will have the same cup size. Surprisingly, this even applies to works with an all-female cast.
This often applies to most supporting characters, too. Occasionally a Fat Girl may appear as a minor comic-relief character, but she will never join the main cast.
This, of course, has a ton of Unfortunate Implications in that men come in a wide range of shapes and sizes, while for women, there is only one "normal" body type and if you don't fit that, there's something wrong with you.
For the face equivalent, see Only Six Faces, Generic Cuteness. Related to the Most Common Superpower. Contrast Pettanko, Amazonian Beauty, Big Beautiful Woman. See also Heroic Build for when this trope applies to superheroines.
Anime and Manga
- One Piece started as this (aside from the rare Token Mini-Moe), though Oda finally decided to be just as outlandish with women as he was with men.
- Uchuu Senkan Yamato and other Leijiverse works owe this to Author Appeal. Males sometimes have a token Gonk just to skew the ratio.
- Sailor Moon. Other than height (and ignoring a certained talented meme), is there really a difference in build among any of the girls in this show?
Film
- An interesting example is in the background of The Incredibles, Edna Mode's design studio has three body type mannequins to model her clothes on: huge buff dude, medium-sized buff dude, and woman.
Newspaper Comics
- Along with Only Six Faces, Beetle Bailey is guilty of this. Apparently, all of Killer's girlfriends have a small slender built.
Toys
- Most of Barbie's friends have the exact same body shape as her, which is especially odd since no real women do.
- Bratz.[context?]
- It even carried over to the animated cartoon, to the point that when one of the male characters disguises himself as a girl, he has exactly the same body shape as the female characters.
- All the females in BB Senshi Sangokuden are the exact same build, regardless of age, while males come under regular, Toutaku, and Ryofu Tallgeese.
- Initially played straight with Monster High (although the dolls did have different face molds) until the release of Nefera De Nile's doll, which has a taller mold as she is older than the rest.
- Inverted with the 4th generation My Little Pony "blind bag" toys. 6 female molds, 1 male.
Video Games
- This has been a consistent complaint over World of Warcraft character models; the alpha builds, while rough, often had the females look like counterparts to the males of their race, but when it came time for final builds (after receiving yea many complaints about being ugly) it was like the developers threw up their hands and said "screw it, let's make them all barbie dolls".
- In Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas even the old wrinkle faced women will have young shaped bodies.
- Dragon Age: Origins is pretty bad about this. Morrigan is a twentysomething whose good looks other characters comment on. Wynne is a mage in her sixties. Put them in the same type of armor, and they're identical from the neck down.
- Though it must be said the same is true for male bodies; there are only two body models for human adults of both sexes, "normal" and "fat." Alistair, a warrior in his early twenties also described as attractive and muscular, has the same body model as the much older and ailing Arl Eamon, the elderly Bann Ceorlic, and sundry Squishy Wizard mages of all ages. The "fat" model is used for Lloyd the innkeeper and several extras (the female one shows up only on extras and Arl Eamon's cook).
Web Original
Real Life
- Michaelangelo didn't have female models readily available, and so used his own body as a template for most of his paintings and several of his sculptures.